WinSun apparently keeps its tech tightly under wraps.
That will be a box containing 2,000 coolies armed with tubes of araldite then.
Either that or the box contains nothing we can understand and eventually it will print nothing but a nose.
Oil & gas? Pah. We’ve got a MASSIVE 3D printer, beams Dubai
Dubai has announced it will erect "the world’s first fully functional 3D printed building", hoping to establish the United Arab Emirates "as the global centre of technology in architecture, construction and design". The "approximately 2,000 square feet" structure "will be will be printed layer-by-layer using a 20-foot tall 3D …
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 06:23 GMT jake
During the meanwhile ...
Humans have been 3D printing buildings for thousands of years.
See Adobe[0][1]. The pixels are largish, but the resulting product is quite usable, and long-lasting as long as you can keep the rain off.
[0] No, not that Adobe.
[1] Note that the word itself is Arabic/Coptic/Egyptian in origin.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 09:45 GMT Terry 6
Labour costs? In Dubai!
What labour costs?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7985361.stm
None had been paid the money they were promised by the recruitment agencies, and many said they couldn't afford to eat properly, living on a diet of potatoes, lentils and bread. Average salaries are often no more than £120 a month. This for a six-day week, often working up to 12-hour shifts. One company paid approximately 30p an hour for overtime.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 12:55 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: First??
"... that everything in the building is 3D printed as well."
You're not serious, I hope.
The media, including the old El Reg, is constantly guilty of using the noun for the 'next higher assembly' (or many levels up) after the adjective '3D printed'.
Even the BBC just the other day referred to a "3D printed car", when it was just some brackets 'nodes' holding together the tubing that were reportedly 3D printed.
You need to do better.
Quote the PR Flak misusing the language, and then do your job, mock them.
Thank you. Cheers.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 13:19 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: First??
"... a 3D printed 3D printer..."
I actually had this debate with some commentard. He claimed that he 'did' in fact have a '3D printed' 3D printer.
Further discussion revealed the duh-obvious truth. The gadget had some plastic bits that were 3D printed at about 100 times the price of injection molding. The rest of the 3D printer kit (99.9%) was a bunch of metal and electronics ordered off ebay for about $1000.
Pure hype that is demonstrably damaging weak minds. Read some of the breathless commentards with their naive wishful beliefs that "3D Printing will replace all traditional manufacturing in 'n' years"; where 'n' is often a single digit number of years.
The media needs to mock such hype.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 14:13 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: First??
Looking at the WinSun links it appears to be a concrete extruder similar to the one shown in this TEDx talk. It does sound like they are, at the moment, just making large custom concrete blocks and sticking it all together at the end which is no doubt easier and more practical than dragging a huge precision squirter out to the job site. If they can get it all into an ISO shipping container and it's easily set up/broken down then maybe they'll be able to "print" something. To me it looks a bit like precision shotcrete/gunite.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 13:09 GMT JeffyPoooh
"3D Printed" is most often obvious nonsense...
One can almost see how they'd 'print' the walls, one layer upon the next. They might have to slow down and manually insert the lintels over the door and window openings, but one could forgive that minor detail.
But when they get to the very first ceiling, squirting concrete into empty space in a gravitational field will result in it accelerating down at approximately 9.8m/s^2. Splat. Does the printer emit a space filling material, maybe sand, to fill the voids, so that the next layer of ceiling is supported? So the design has to support 1300 lbs of sand per square foot on each level?
Also, their printer's nozzle will need to extrude rebar as well as concrete. Especially if it needs to support a floor full of sand. Not to mention conduit for later installing cables and wires. And electrical boxes. Do the printer extrude glass and wood, with precision hinges? Is it a building, or a shell?
"3D printed" = B.S. hype
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 16:08 GMT Mark 85
Re: "3D Printed" is most often obvious nonsense...
As pointed out above by Eddy Ito, this appears to be concrete extruder or a variation. I'll have to re-find a recent article that discussed how "3-D printed buildings" could/would be done. Yeah..there's still scaffolding, supports for a poured roof, etc. But the walls are built layer by layer and end up looking a lot like big version of what current output of the printers using plastic where the layers can actually be seen.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 17:16 GMT Mark 85
Re: "3D Printed" is most often obvious nonsense...
Yeah, but.. we're not marketing types. We know this. Sort of amazing how marketing twists the buzzwords, isn't it. Like the auto industry back a few decades touting "space-age materials" when the only place they used things like carbon fiber and titanium were in the trim work.
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Thursday 2nd July 2015 18:01 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: "3D Printed" is most often obvious nonsense...
I don't mind the marketing types lying, that's their job. The media, especially the tech media, should be quoting the liars and then mocking them.
A plastic bit in a thing is not the thing itself.
The vast majority of "3D printed" things are actually just things with some 3D printed subassemblies.
Or perhaps an empty shell that still requires the other 80% or more of the usual finishing work to finish it to finally become what it is supposed to be.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
